I recently got my Assault to max level. This was a class I initially thought I'd never play, but after levelling up a little and unlocking some skills and weapons, I appreciated the damage and the point-and-shoot gameplay of the class. Of all the classes, the Assault plays the most like a traditional FPS: damage damage damage (bombs, guns, rocket/grenade launchers). You have the option to spec for defense so you can take a lot of punishment and be easy to heal, but I specced mine for straight up RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA MAX SPLASH DAMAGE and equipped the Magma-"Noob"-Lance rocket launcher.
The MagmaNoobLance does a lot of direct damage, some splash damage, and ignites the target with a DOT. In addition to damage, the other nice thing about the rocket launcher is mobility --- find the target, squeeze trigger, and move on while the rocket is in the air. The disadvantages of speccing the Assault for damage are that you're squishy, and it consumes a lot of power. In a few instances in the video below, I had insufficient power to kill the target under my crosshair. Also, my spec is more for solo play, and there are specs that synergize with other classes (like the Medic) better.
I'm not as spry as I used to be and can't really "air-rocket" in this game (yet... :P), but the Assault is fun to log into sometimes for a change, and turn my brain off and pew pew.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Robotics: fun with turrets (and drones)
After spending more time with each class, I'm starting to like Robotics a little more than the rest. The set of equipment I've settled into has: Personal turret, Hornet and Grizzly. The personal turret is a deployable with a short cooldown, short range and can fire 180 degrees around it with 100% accuracy. The hornet and grizzly are drones that automatically attack targets in range. Turrets stay alive until they are destroyed or another turret is built, while drones only appear for a short time.
In the past, I've either focused on turrets and stations and had a more bunkered style of play, or I've been super mobile, flying around and dropping drones to do all the dirty work. But lately, I have found that it's actually very effective to use both turrets and drones together. I've even ditched all my defensive abilities like shield wall and healing station.
My first priority is usually to find a super sweet spot to set up my turret. A well-placed turret can really ruin someone's day, and can be the difference that wins or loses games. The super sweet spot could be somewhere just outside everyone's field of view, or somewhere people are not paying attention to. In "escort the payload" missions, this can be in a nice blind spot around the corner that people are going to walk by, where they don't realize the turret until they're dead. However, once the turret is up, it's only a matter of time until it kills enough people and people start to notice and try to take it down. This is where I used to have troubles in the past. Someone would enter the "deadzone" behind the turret's arc of fire and try to destroy my turret. I've tried to spec for rifle damage but I couldn't kill my target before my turret died. I also tried speccing for max repair power, but I couldn't heal my turret through the damage or they'd stop attacking my turret and start attacking me instead. Then, with my turret down, my killing power would drop drastically for a while and I would have lost control over an area.
This is where the drones come in. By using drones with turrets, there are no longer any deadzones. Anyone trying to destroy my turret at close range will be welcomed into a 360-degree meatgrinder. I can also set up nice angles by using the turrets with the drones, by being in two places at once. E.g. a turret can pressure people to hide behind a rock, and I can then drop a drone behind the rock. The drones work well to take out enemy turrets too.
The following video starts of with me setting up a turret in a blind spot right outside the enemy starting point. It slaughters people one after another as they fly out. The mission is "payload escort" mission. I was on the defending team, so our goal was to make sure that all the bars in the top right of the screen don't turn red. We actually get pushed back all the way to the last checkpoint, but we stood our ground and repelled the payload. On my hotbar, C is Hornet, X is Grizzly and E is Turret.
The next video shows robo gameplay on other missions. The video ends with a short clip of me and another robo working together in a Payload mission to set up a nasty bunker in a stairwell to stop the payload. He also deployed a sensor, so you may notice that many stealthers that tried to sneak in to blow stuff up got busted and shredded.
In the past, I've either focused on turrets and stations and had a more bunkered style of play, or I've been super mobile, flying around and dropping drones to do all the dirty work. But lately, I have found that it's actually very effective to use both turrets and drones together. I've even ditched all my defensive abilities like shield wall and healing station.
My first priority is usually to find a super sweet spot to set up my turret. A well-placed turret can really ruin someone's day, and can be the difference that wins or loses games. The super sweet spot could be somewhere just outside everyone's field of view, or somewhere people are not paying attention to. In "escort the payload" missions, this can be in a nice blind spot around the corner that people are going to walk by, where they don't realize the turret until they're dead. However, once the turret is up, it's only a matter of time until it kills enough people and people start to notice and try to take it down. This is where I used to have troubles in the past. Someone would enter the "deadzone" behind the turret's arc of fire and try to destroy my turret. I've tried to spec for rifle damage but I couldn't kill my target before my turret died. I also tried speccing for max repair power, but I couldn't heal my turret through the damage or they'd stop attacking my turret and start attacking me instead. Then, with my turret down, my killing power would drop drastically for a while and I would have lost control over an area.
This is where the drones come in. By using drones with turrets, there are no longer any deadzones. Anyone trying to destroy my turret at close range will be welcomed into a 360-degree meatgrinder. I can also set up nice angles by using the turrets with the drones, by being in two places at once. E.g. a turret can pressure people to hide behind a rock, and I can then drop a drone behind the rock. The drones work well to take out enemy turrets too.
The following video starts of with me setting up a turret in a blind spot right outside the enemy starting point. It slaughters people one after another as they fly out. The mission is "payload escort" mission. I was on the defending team, so our goal was to make sure that all the bars in the top right of the screen don't turn red. We actually get pushed back all the way to the last checkpoint, but we stood our ground and repelled the payload. On my hotbar, C is Hornet, X is Grizzly and E is Turret.
The next video shows robo gameplay on other missions. The video ends with a short clip of me and another robo working together in a Payload mission to set up a nasty bunker in a stairwell to stop the payload. He also deployed a sensor, so you may notice that many stealthers that tried to sneak in to blow stuff up got busted and shredded.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Aion stun defense: case study of a bad C&C patch
Somehow I still get Aion newsletters, even though I have unsubscribed. I am always curious about game design changes, so I read it anyway. The newsletter talked about the introduction of a new 'stun defense' ability that will be introduced for 'balance'. I will first paste what they have to say about it, and then I will talk about how this is an example of an overzealous designer (Chris "Kinslon" Hager) trying to fix a problem by not completely understanding the crux of the problem, doing too much, missing the mark, ultimately not really fixing anything at all and creating more problems elsewhere. This happened time and time again in WAR and I wish I had documented every counter-productive patch and hotfix. But I guess better late than never:
Aquilanius: How exactly will the stun defense skills work?
Kinslon: You can purchase the Remove Shock skill from your character's appropriate skill trainer (preceptor). Once your character has learned the skill you've purchased, if your character becomes stunned in combat, Remove Shock becomes available as a chain skill that you can use to remove the stun and increase your character's resistance to stun, knockback, and similar conditions for 7 seconds. At later levels, class-specific skills that you can also learn will act as chain skills that let you go on the offensive in addition to the basic abilities of Remove Shock.
Aquilanius: What purpose does this stun defense have in overall class balance?
Kinslon: With each update in an MMO, the game designers need to rebalance the game's classes as players progress in skill and learn tactics that allow them to optimize (and sometimes overly optimize) specific class abilities. In the Aion 1.9 update, every class can now counteract and counterattack stun blocks to a degree. This strengthens the balance of all of Aion's classes. Future updates will continue to balance and shape each class, allowing players to shift tactics as new and different skills are introduced, and 1.9 is no exception.
First of all, it's good that the designers are aware that there is a problem with some classes (e.g., a well-geared Assassin can burst someone down from stealth while his target is stunned/disabled the entire time). But the problem with the stun defense is that they plan to give it to everyone. Here's a example to illustrate why this is a bad idea using Spiritmaster vs Chanters, since I am familiar with them. The only ranged stun a Chanter has is Soul Strike. It's a 4 sec stun with a 12 sec cooldown. If Spiritmasters are given this "blanket" stun defense ability, Chanters are pretty much f*cked. They just took away the only ranged stun a Chanter has, and the only way for a Chanter to get into melee range or kite a Spiritmaster. To make matters worse, Soul Strike doesn't even stun 100% of the time, AND pretty much all the CC a Chanter has is in the form of stuns! Might as well rename the 'Remove Shock' ability to 'F*ck you Chanters, LOL'.
Besides, I'm not even sure if this will fix the original problem of classes like the Assassin. Okay, so you can hit the button and be stun-free for 7 seconds. But within that 7 seconds, Assassins also can cast a buff to resist 2 magical attacks (this includes CCs). If you do wipe that buff off, there's no way you can CC him either. Snare/root him and the game already allows people to remove that with a potion. And now, he's buffed to be unstunnable as well because the new stun defense grants everyone the 7-second stun immunity. This change only marginally improves the problem scenarios, and hurts everyone else that didn't have a problem with stuns to begin with.
What they should have done instead, was specifically fix the problem classes, instead of taking this lazy one-size-fits-all fix.
Aquilanius: How exactly will the stun defense skills work?
Kinslon: You can purchase the Remove Shock skill from your character's appropriate skill trainer (preceptor). Once your character has learned the skill you've purchased, if your character becomes stunned in combat, Remove Shock becomes available as a chain skill that you can use to remove the stun and increase your character's resistance to stun, knockback, and similar conditions for 7 seconds. At later levels, class-specific skills that you can also learn will act as chain skills that let you go on the offensive in addition to the basic abilities of Remove Shock.
Aquilanius: What purpose does this stun defense have in overall class balance?
Kinslon: With each update in an MMO, the game designers need to rebalance the game's classes as players progress in skill and learn tactics that allow them to optimize (and sometimes overly optimize) specific class abilities. In the Aion 1.9 update, every class can now counteract and counterattack stun blocks to a degree. This strengthens the balance of all of Aion's classes. Future updates will continue to balance and shape each class, allowing players to shift tactics as new and different skills are introduced, and 1.9 is no exception.
First of all, it's good that the designers are aware that there is a problem with some classes (e.g., a well-geared Assassin can burst someone down from stealth while his target is stunned/disabled the entire time). But the problem with the stun defense is that they plan to give it to everyone. Here's a example to illustrate why this is a bad idea using Spiritmaster vs Chanters, since I am familiar with them. The only ranged stun a Chanter has is Soul Strike. It's a 4 sec stun with a 12 sec cooldown. If Spiritmasters are given this "blanket" stun defense ability, Chanters are pretty much f*cked. They just took away the only ranged stun a Chanter has, and the only way for a Chanter to get into melee range or kite a Spiritmaster. To make matters worse, Soul Strike doesn't even stun 100% of the time, AND pretty much all the CC a Chanter has is in the form of stuns! Might as well rename the 'Remove Shock' ability to 'F*ck you Chanters, LOL'.
Besides, I'm not even sure if this will fix the original problem of classes like the Assassin. Okay, so you can hit the button and be stun-free for 7 seconds. But within that 7 seconds, Assassins also can cast a buff to resist 2 magical attacks (this includes CCs). If you do wipe that buff off, there's no way you can CC him either. Snare/root him and the game already allows people to remove that with a potion. And now, he's buffed to be unstunnable as well because the new stun defense grants everyone the 7-second stun immunity. This change only marginally improves the problem scenarios, and hurts everyone else that didn't have a problem with stuns to begin with.
What they should have done instead, was specifically fix the problem classes, instead of taking this lazy one-size-fits-all fix.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Aion: analysis of the last grind that broke my back
Some of you may have noticed that I no longer post Aion videos. I have retired my Spiritmaster a few months ago and moved on to Global Agenda. Aion has some unique characteristics that I believe will prevent it from ever being successful in the western market. Sure it's grindy, but many people are okay with grindy. More than that, there is something unique about its grindiness that I have been wanting to talk about but haven't gotten a chance to (until now). I will attempt to paint a picture of Aion below, with key issues bolded.
Those who haven't played Aion may not appreciate what I'm talking about without some more background information about Aion's "endgame", "PvPvE" and "the grind". In summary, it takes a while to get to max level (50). In the time it took me to get to Level 50 in Aion, I could have gotten 3-4 characters to max level in Warhammer, and maybe 1-2 characters to max level in WoW (or 6 characters via the Recruit-a-Friend bonuses) .
The grinding in Aion is split in to what I think of as "grind buckets". Every couple of levels, you receive quests or get access to certain zones that place your character in a particular "grind bucket". The first grind bucket rewards you with Boots that give you +20% run speed. This is a tremendous advantage and necessary for PVP. You can either get your 20% speed boots via PVE by killing a thousand elite NPCs, or by doing Abyss/PvPvE stuff to get enough Abyss points to spend on the PVP version. The next couple of grind buckets involve grinding to obtain player abilities or grinding a few thousand more PVE kills to claim a nice gear reward. But almost invariably, every grind bucket requires you to spend money. Killing NPCs alone isn't enough --- the game often requires that you spend money crafting or buying some expensive item to turn in along with whatever crap you've been picking up from the NPCs.
Everyone in the same "grind bucket" may group up and keep each other company through the grind, to get whatever reward is associated with the bucket. The first few buckets may take days to weeks of playing time, while the last few buckets take months. When people graduate from one grind bucket to move on to the next, they usually never want to revisit the previous grind bucket. If you miss the train, or don't grind as fast as everyone else, you will be left behind and on your own. Throughout the game, people are constantly left behind in grind buckets, alienated and ultimately demotivated to unsubscribe. This may not be as apparent in games like Warhammer or WoW, because the grind buckets aren't as severe.
It was the "end game" grind bucket that killed me. You had to do things like kill thousands of silly NPCs. You had to wait for spawns all around the world at different times of day (there was a chance that they did not appear). You had to level a profession to Expert, costing insane amounts of money if you started the wrong profession (once you've started the expert quest on one profession, the game didn't let you change) and it involved standing in the crafting area for hours, just clicking on the 'craft' button. Then, you had to pass the Expert crafting exam by crafting a rare item that costs a lot of money or rare materials with a chance to fail. Many people's banks were bled dry by this point. But it's not over yet. The pinnacle of this chain's grind was collecting rare materials that came mostly from PVP zones. The drop rate was something like < 5% per NPC at a contested PVP zone, and you needed more than a 100 of them. For reference, I was getting one of them every couple of hours of playing. If you tried to cooperate with friends to farm them, you wouldn't necessarily be faster since you would have to split the drops with everyone. Needless to say they were expensive, so it was either grind them or grind something else to get enough money to buy them. But there's more. After you've collected all your rare items, you don't simply turn them in for your reward. You need to craft something with all of the materials, and THEN turn in the crafted item. What crushed my soul was the fact that you had a chance to fail at crafting the final item. I believe it was a 20% chance to succeed, 80% chance to fail.
Now that is ridiculous. Most people can tolerate a grind if there is a certain end in sight. If the end is certain, you know that any time you put in will bring you one step closer to your reward, and that you will eventually get the reward. It was only a matter of time. But once you place a random number generator at the end, it's demoralizing. If you are lucky, you could get it on your first try. But since it's random and each try is independent, you could be unlucky and fail 100 times. There is also a probability (even if it's slim) that you fail 1000 times. I wanted to PVP, not battle a random number generator.
Needless to say, I only focused on one character in Aion, which is a shame because one of the fun things of an MMORPG is trying out different classes/careers.
All this wouldn't make as much of a difference if Skill > Gear. If Skill > Gear, there will be less pressure to grind, and less reason for activities like botting and RMT to flourish. Unfortunately, Aion rewards grinders and encourages Gear > Skill. In fact, Gear in Aion is allowed to negate Skill so much that it's not even worth trying to fight sometimes because the chance of winning is almost zero. For example, the set bonus from completing the final epic gear quest bumps up magic resist so much, that someone else who has not completed the quest and has not received the full set bonuses has a slim chance of landing any magical abilities. Another example: if you are an Assassin with good gear, you can pretty much sneak up on someone, open up with some Combos that lead into stuns or a disable, and kill even tank classes --- all within the brief period of time that the player is disabled. You literally cannot do a single thing. Well... except go back to grinding.
But this points to another problem. Once you fall behind the gear race in Aion, it's almost impossible to catch up. The reason for this is that the final gear grind buckets requires "grinding" in a PVP zone. But since Gear > Skill, once you are outgeared, you will most probably be roflstomped in the PVP zones, and any PVP-zone-related quests will be inhibited. You will be unable to advance, while your opponents are free to extend their lead, causing the gear gap to widen exponentially. Not surprisingly, my guildie tells me that this is exactly what has happened on Zikel --- the entire "Core" (the highest-level PVP zone in the Abyss) is dominated by Elyos and Asmodians cannot do anything about it.
Ultimately, it wasn't just the grind. As much as I loved my Spiritmaster and PVP, the PVP environment in Aion wasn't that great. There are only a few ways you could PVP in Aion:
a) Rift into enemy territory
This required you to teleport to the enemy zone via a "rift" that would spawn at a random location in the friendly zone. At max level, you probably only had one rift that you could enter through every hour or so. The nice thing about rifting is that the zones are no-fly zones; and you don't have to suffer Aion's broken flight combat. The cons about this is that the rifts are not always available, and you need to pay for a resurrection kisk to resurrect in the enemy zone. Without a kisk deployed, deaths send you back to your friendly zone and you'll have to try to find a working rift again.
b) Go to the Abyss
This is an open PVP zone where everyone is flying most of the time. I typically stay away from this zone since flight combat sucks in Aion. This is also where all the artifacts and fortresses are, but I stay away from them too since they encourage zergy PVP.
c) Dredgion
Every now and then, action in the Abyss unlocks the Dredgion 'scenario'. This is an instance where you have human players on opposing factions fighting for similar PVE objectives. I like to play this whenever I can. The downside is you can only play one Dredgion game each time it becomes available.
I think the only reason I kept playing for as long as I did was because I enjoyed the Spiritmaster class. I still feel that they did a good job with core PVP combat (all else being equal). It was the world they wrapped around it, flight, their flavor of grinding, and how they let gear rule the world that sucked.
Those who haven't played Aion may not appreciate what I'm talking about without some more background information about Aion's "endgame", "PvPvE" and "the grind". In summary, it takes a while to get to max level (50). In the time it took me to get to Level 50 in Aion, I could have gotten 3-4 characters to max level in Warhammer, and maybe 1-2 characters to max level in WoW (or 6 characters via the Recruit-a-Friend bonuses) .
The grinding in Aion is split in to what I think of as "grind buckets". Every couple of levels, you receive quests or get access to certain zones that place your character in a particular "grind bucket". The first grind bucket rewards you with Boots that give you +20% run speed. This is a tremendous advantage and necessary for PVP. You can either get your 20% speed boots via PVE by killing a thousand elite NPCs, or by doing Abyss/PvPvE stuff to get enough Abyss points to spend on the PVP version. The next couple of grind buckets involve grinding to obtain player abilities or grinding a few thousand more PVE kills to claim a nice gear reward. But almost invariably, every grind bucket requires you to spend money. Killing NPCs alone isn't enough --- the game often requires that you spend money crafting or buying some expensive item to turn in along with whatever crap you've been picking up from the NPCs.
Everyone in the same "grind bucket" may group up and keep each other company through the grind, to get whatever reward is associated with the bucket. The first few buckets may take days to weeks of playing time, while the last few buckets take months. When people graduate from one grind bucket to move on to the next, they usually never want to revisit the previous grind bucket. If you miss the train, or don't grind as fast as everyone else, you will be left behind and on your own. Throughout the game, people are constantly left behind in grind buckets, alienated and ultimately demotivated to unsubscribe. This may not be as apparent in games like Warhammer or WoW, because the grind buckets aren't as severe.
It was the "end game" grind bucket that killed me. You had to do things like kill thousands of silly NPCs. You had to wait for spawns all around the world at different times of day (there was a chance that they did not appear). You had to level a profession to Expert, costing insane amounts of money if you started the wrong profession (once you've started the expert quest on one profession, the game didn't let you change) and it involved standing in the crafting area for hours, just clicking on the 'craft' button. Then, you had to pass the Expert crafting exam by crafting a rare item that costs a lot of money or rare materials with a chance to fail. Many people's banks were bled dry by this point. But it's not over yet. The pinnacle of this chain's grind was collecting rare materials that came mostly from PVP zones. The drop rate was something like < 5% per NPC at a contested PVP zone, and you needed more than a 100 of them. For reference, I was getting one of them every couple of hours of playing. If you tried to cooperate with friends to farm them, you wouldn't necessarily be faster since you would have to split the drops with everyone. Needless to say they were expensive, so it was either grind them or grind something else to get enough money to buy them. But there's more. After you've collected all your rare items, you don't simply turn them in for your reward. You need to craft something with all of the materials, and THEN turn in the crafted item. What crushed my soul was the fact that you had a chance to fail at crafting the final item. I believe it was a 20% chance to succeed, 80% chance to fail.
Now that is ridiculous. Most people can tolerate a grind if there is a certain end in sight. If the end is certain, you know that any time you put in will bring you one step closer to your reward, and that you will eventually get the reward. It was only a matter of time. But once you place a random number generator at the end, it's demoralizing. If you are lucky, you could get it on your first try. But since it's random and each try is independent, you could be unlucky and fail 100 times. There is also a probability (even if it's slim) that you fail 1000 times. I wanted to PVP, not battle a random number generator.
Needless to say, I only focused on one character in Aion, which is a shame because one of the fun things of an MMORPG is trying out different classes/careers.
All this wouldn't make as much of a difference if Skill > Gear. If Skill > Gear, there will be less pressure to grind, and less reason for activities like botting and RMT to flourish. Unfortunately, Aion rewards grinders and encourages Gear > Skill. In fact, Gear in Aion is allowed to negate Skill so much that it's not even worth trying to fight sometimes because the chance of winning is almost zero. For example, the set bonus from completing the final epic gear quest bumps up magic resist so much, that someone else who has not completed the quest and has not received the full set bonuses has a slim chance of landing any magical abilities. Another example: if you are an Assassin with good gear, you can pretty much sneak up on someone, open up with some Combos that lead into stuns or a disable, and kill even tank classes --- all within the brief period of time that the player is disabled. You literally cannot do a single thing. Well... except go back to grinding.
But this points to another problem. Once you fall behind the gear race in Aion, it's almost impossible to catch up. The reason for this is that the final gear grind buckets requires "grinding" in a PVP zone. But since Gear > Skill, once you are outgeared, you will most probably be roflstomped in the PVP zones, and any PVP-zone-related quests will be inhibited. You will be unable to advance, while your opponents are free to extend their lead, causing the gear gap to widen exponentially. Not surprisingly, my guildie tells me that this is exactly what has happened on Zikel --- the entire "Core" (the highest-level PVP zone in the Abyss) is dominated by Elyos and Asmodians cannot do anything about it.
Ultimately, it wasn't just the grind. As much as I loved my Spiritmaster and PVP, the PVP environment in Aion wasn't that great. There are only a few ways you could PVP in Aion:
a) Rift into enemy territory
This required you to teleport to the enemy zone via a "rift" that would spawn at a random location in the friendly zone. At max level, you probably only had one rift that you could enter through every hour or so. The nice thing about rifting is that the zones are no-fly zones; and you don't have to suffer Aion's broken flight combat. The cons about this is that the rifts are not always available, and you need to pay for a resurrection kisk to resurrect in the enemy zone. Without a kisk deployed, deaths send you back to your friendly zone and you'll have to try to find a working rift again.
b) Go to the Abyss
This is an open PVP zone where everyone is flying most of the time. I typically stay away from this zone since flight combat sucks in Aion. This is also where all the artifacts and fortresses are, but I stay away from them too since they encourage zergy PVP.
c) Dredgion
Every now and then, action in the Abyss unlocks the Dredgion 'scenario'. This is an instance where you have human players on opposing factions fighting for similar PVE objectives. I like to play this whenever I can. The downside is you can only play one Dredgion game each time it becomes available.
I think the only reason I kept playing for as long as I did was because I enjoyed the Spiritmaster class. I still feel that they did a good job with core PVP combat (all else being equal). It was the world they wrapped around it, flight, their flavor of grinding, and how they let gear rule the world that sucked.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Final Fantasy XIV: PVE > PVP?
If you asked me a year or two ago, I would have scoffed at the idea of playing a Final Fantasy game. But the way games have been going lately, I am expecting a PVE-centric game like Final Fantasy to be a nice change of pace, even for the PVP fan that I am. My rationale is as follows.
Fewer design constraints
If PVP is excluded from the picture, many constraints are removed from the equation, and there is less pressure for the dev team to get things right. I.e., there are fewer ways for the dev team to screw up. This allows them to focus on other parts of the game instead of tinkering with and breaking this and that (optimization is a more difficult problem than adding PVE content and an amateur dev team will typically fail).
It's okay if classes are not balanced
In a PVE game, classes do not have to be balanced for the game to be healthy. As long as each class is fun to whoever plays it, the game wins. In a PVE game, no one will complain if a rogue class is able to stealth indefinitely, if a glass cannon class has no way to get out of stuns, if a healing class can also do decent damage; or about something more detailed like "melee class M has 3 CCs while ranged class R only has 2 counter-CCs".
Everyone is allowed to be "overpowered"
In a PVP game, if one class is ever allowed to 1-shot another class by design, many people would be disappointed. It's like the phrase from The Incredibles, "when everyone's super, no one will be". In a PVP game, no matter how powerful your abilities may seem on paper, you can bet that your opponents will have equally powerful abilities. You will never get the feeling of superiority that you thought you would, even as you hurl fireballs from your finger tips and shoot lightning from your ass. This is because a PVP game will never allow you to "overpower" your opponent. You are never supposed to fight 10 enemies by yourself and expect to win. In a PVE game, however, your opponents are allowed to be lesser beings, and you are allowed to feel... "super". Isn't this why people play RPGs in the first place? To feel awesome?
No gear grind?
MMORPGs typically offer a gear progression and reward players with better gear after a 'grind'. This necessitates a grind in order to be competitive in PVP. The people who don't (or cannot) grind as much will always be at a disadvantage to the people who grind more. Thus, an invisible "bar" is set by how much effort everyone in the game is willing to grind (or pay for someone else to grind). If you fall below this bar, you will almost certainly have a worse gaming experience than everyone above the bar. Also, note that the bar always rises and never falls, since everyone is always upgrading their gear. Leave for a week-long vacation? Get bogged down by RL commitments? The invisible bar would have inched higher and you are a little less powerful than you used to be, relative to everyone else. In a PVE game however, no one suffers for the benefit of another person's enjoyment. The "bar" would have been set by the game designers as a prerequisite to PVE content, but it is static. Fall a little behind because of RL? That's alright --- the content is waiting for you exactly where you left off --- you're not going to suddenly get facerolled by noobs who grinded more than you.
What I'm looking out for now is either a PVE game, or a PVP game where skill > gear. I'm definitely going to check out FFXIV since my girlfriend's a big fan. We'll find out if I'm right about a PVE-centric game being a nice change of pace. They're supposedly upgrading their PVP experience, but I'm actually hoping that they stick to their bread-and-butter and keep it PVE, for the reasons above.
Fewer design constraints
If PVP is excluded from the picture, many constraints are removed from the equation, and there is less pressure for the dev team to get things right. I.e., there are fewer ways for the dev team to screw up. This allows them to focus on other parts of the game instead of tinkering with and breaking this and that (optimization is a more difficult problem than adding PVE content and an amateur dev team will typically fail).
It's okay if classes are not balanced
In a PVE game, classes do not have to be balanced for the game to be healthy. As long as each class is fun to whoever plays it, the game wins. In a PVE game, no one will complain if a rogue class is able to stealth indefinitely, if a glass cannon class has no way to get out of stuns, if a healing class can also do decent damage; or about something more detailed like "melee class M has 3 CCs while ranged class R only has 2 counter-CCs".
Everyone is allowed to be "overpowered"
In a PVP game, if one class is ever allowed to 1-shot another class by design, many people would be disappointed. It's like the phrase from The Incredibles, "when everyone's super, no one will be". In a PVP game, no matter how powerful your abilities may seem on paper, you can bet that your opponents will have equally powerful abilities. You will never get the feeling of superiority that you thought you would, even as you hurl fireballs from your finger tips and shoot lightning from your ass. This is because a PVP game will never allow you to "overpower" your opponent. You are never supposed to fight 10 enemies by yourself and expect to win. In a PVE game, however, your opponents are allowed to be lesser beings, and you are allowed to feel... "super". Isn't this why people play RPGs in the first place? To feel awesome?
No gear grind?
MMORPGs typically offer a gear progression and reward players with better gear after a 'grind'. This necessitates a grind in order to be competitive in PVP. The people who don't (or cannot) grind as much will always be at a disadvantage to the people who grind more. Thus, an invisible "bar" is set by how much effort everyone in the game is willing to grind (or pay for someone else to grind). If you fall below this bar, you will almost certainly have a worse gaming experience than everyone above the bar. Also, note that the bar always rises and never falls, since everyone is always upgrading their gear. Leave for a week-long vacation? Get bogged down by RL commitments? The invisible bar would have inched higher and you are a little less powerful than you used to be, relative to everyone else. In a PVE game however, no one suffers for the benefit of another person's enjoyment. The "bar" would have been set by the game designers as a prerequisite to PVE content, but it is static. Fall a little behind because of RL? That's alright --- the content is waiting for you exactly where you left off --- you're not going to suddenly get facerolled by noobs who grinded more than you.
What I'm looking out for now is either a PVE game, or a PVP game where skill > gear. I'm definitely going to check out FFXIV since my girlfriend's a big fan. We'll find out if I'm right about a PVE-centric game being a nice change of pace. They're supposedly upgrading their PVP experience, but I'm actually hoping that they stick to their bread-and-butter and keep it PVE, for the reasons above.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Recon: fun with mines
Lately, one of my favorite moves in Global Agenda as a Recon is to herd people into mines. Note that mines will not automatically detonate if they're dropped under someone; they will only detonate if someone walks over them. I like to drop mines where I think my targets will run toward, then try to freak them out by swinging my big sword in their face and bait them to trip on my mines.
For those of you who don't play Global Agenda, you can spot mines by the tiny column of light they emit from the ground. They are bound to the 'X' key on my hotbar, which is located at the bottom left of the screen. Kills are displayed as blue "You defeated ..." or "You assisted ..." messages in the middle of the screen. Hope you enjoy these "mine fun" moments as much as I did :)
For those of you who don't play Global Agenda, you can spot mines by the tiny column of light they emit from the ground. They are bound to the 'X' key on my hotbar, which is located at the bottom left of the screen. Kills are displayed as blue "You defeated ..." or "You assisted ..." messages in the middle of the screen. Hope you enjoy these "mine fun" moments as much as I did :)
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